How Lucky Do You Feel? « Stephen Rees’s blog

Stephen Rees’s blog

How Lucky Do You Feel?

Posted in Impact of Climate Change by Stephen Rees on November 11th, 2007

2 Responses to 'How Lucky Do You Feel?'

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ghostsmachine said, on November 12th, 2007 at 3:39 am

And.. in response… the answer is to STOP WORKING.
again I make the case that the only truly reasonable and responsible response is the recognition that “having less” does not equal “being less”.
We absolutely must begin to allow people to refrain from production - of all kinds. That means we stop producing people, we stop producing cars, we stop producing 42″ plasma TV’s, etc etc etc.
Let people sign away their rights to work, to own a car, let them sit all day if they wish reading a book, tending to their children or growing some food - just keep them away from the goddamn plastic injection molder.
People must undertake this willingly and with the recognition of its necessity to our survival. It is not dissimiliar to those who scrimped and saved towards “the war effort”. They were made to feel as if their sacrifice had a demonstrable impact on the lives of their children and on their own “freedoms”. Today, being poor and thrifty is to be a cultural and societal leper. A mindset that is frankly criminal.
To be cajoled via “economic necessity” into producing crap unnecesary to life, in the effort to enrich the few at the expense of many is not a freedom people should be dying for; it’s a noose we’re going to hang oursleves with.

And yet we’ve just spent the last 3 generations or so mind fucking the masses into thinking that this is as good as it gets - and it can only get better. This kind of campaign is the real challenge to thinking outside the box, running stuff up the flagpole or finding personal empowerment.
So the next time I hear - or you hear - some corporate spewed bullshit about “worker flexibility” or “lifelong learning” or some such crud - ask yourself how capitalism can eat itself and survive - because that’s what we’re asking of it.
It’s a dead horse we’re riding.
sgt.turmeric said, on November 12th, 2007 at 12:03 pm

I think the box in the lower-left corner contains a massive, huge assumption. That’s the box in the grid that corresponds to “true, global warming is real” and “yes, take action to counter-act it.”

In the grid that box has a a happy face, because the action we take stops global warming from being such a big problem. I think that’s a huge assumption. It’s not really clear to me that we can actually do anything at this point. I’m a pessimist, though; all of my grid diagrams are filled with frowning faces.